Hijacking our lizard brains

As usual of late, the Red Sox were producing intense dysphoria yesterday so I surfed over to CNN a few times for the latest. All they could talk about, in spite of, you know, some other stuff that's going on in the world, was the clownish "car bomb" attempt on Times Square.

As the details come out, it seems pretty clear to me -- even though I'm not a genius reporter for a major news gathering operation -- that this was a lot more like a weird prank than an actual attempted bombing. The car contained propane tanks for your backyard barbecue; some cans of gasoline; a box full of ordinary (non-explosive) garden fertilizer; two clocks attached to wires which were in turn attached to nothing, apparently; and some toy firecrackers that wouldn't even blow your fingers off. Apparently they guy lit some of the firecrackers before he bolted, which set fire to the upholstery.

Those propane tanks are almost impossible to blow up. That's why they sell them at Home Depot to grill your burgers and franks with. You'd be surprised how hard it is to set a can of gasoline on fire, but even if you do, it won't explode per se, it will just burn like crazy. And it won't cause propane tanks to explode. The fertilizer would never have done anything, under any circumstances. Lots of people are now pointing this out but here's one relatively amusing discussion.

So either we had a totally inept clown who thought that by throwing together in one place some random objects that he had vaguely heard were somehow related to possibly blowing stuff up he could emulate his hero, whether that be Timothy McVeigh or Mohammed Atta; or the whole thing was intended only to get a lot of attention it didn't deserve. I lean toward the latter but either way, it got a whole lot of attention it didn't deserve.

I have read that a big reason why Scott Brown was elected to the Senate was because of the UndieBomber. People were suddenly afraid that Martha Coakely and the other Democrats are soft on terrorism because she wanted him prosecuted in the ordinary way by civilian justice. It's utterly ridiculous. If all al Qaeda can do now is have one guy set fire to his nads and another guy set his car upholstery on fire, we probably shouldn't spend time worrying about them or electing Senators on the basis of whether the U.S. Constitution should still be in effect.